Hilary and Hillary: Political Mommy Wars

The question, years ago, from my nursery-school-aged daughter to one of my friends, sent darts of hot regret through my working-mom gut. But it got at a truth belying the phony outrage on all sides about Hilary Rosen’s put-down of Ann Romney as a woman who had “never worked a day in her life.” Even a three-year-old distinguishes between the work world and the home front.

To say that staying home and raising children isn’t, strictly speaking, “work” is not the same as saying that it’s not hard, or not valuable. No one with children—which Rosen has—could ever suggest that taking care of them is easy. But when unemployment statistics are compiled, they don’t include unpaid labor. Volunteer work and full-time parenting are laudable and socially essential, but they aren’t the same thing as a paid job. Employment, or the lack of it, is the burning issue in America’s economy at the moment. It was in that context—a discussion of the unemployment numbers on a television talk show, and Romney’s comments that Ann was his source for women’s opinions on the issue—that Rosen spoke.

So how did we end up back in the same kitchen where Hillary Clinton was during Bill Clinton’s first Presidential campaign, when she had to flagellate herself in remorse for having said that she supposed she could have just “stayed home and baked cookies”?

One answer is that there is no more reliable wedge issue sure to turn women against each other than the endlessly touchy subject of who is a better exemplar of modern womanhood: the mothers who stay at home to raise their children full-time, or those who head off in the morning to earn a paycheck outside the house. Any time the issue can be ignited in politics, those who want to divide women gain. The resentments and suspicions and insecurities of women on both sides are so deep that it is a surefire way to undermine any chance of women uniting into something resembling a solid voter bloc. If you want to distract women from issues on which the government actually has a policy role, such as the availability and legality of health-care services (including abortion), childcare, and equal pay, it’s perfect.

Given the predictable fury that this fight unleashes, it’s confounding how both Hillary and Hilary managed to get tripped up. Anyone who has friends on both sides of the Mommy Divide knows that you have to choose your words in discussing it with more care than a nuclear-arms negotiator. Both the Hil(l)arys are successful, well-spoken professional women in Washington. And both are dedicated mothers. They’ve both devoted years to supporting women’s causes. But their choice of words made it easy for their opponents to pounce. The fatal error from both was a faint and surely inadvertent whiff of smugness, detectable like a dog whistle to those hyper-attuned to this fight. “Baking cookies” denoted frivolousness. Similarly, Rosen’s shot at Ann Romney was aimed at dismissing her as a lady of leisure. This would seem to be a pretty wide-open target, given that Ann Romney once described the greatest financial hardships her family endured as the early days when her husband was in graduate school: “We had no income except the stock we were chipping away at. We were living on the edge, not entertaining.”

By saying that Mrs. Romney had never “worked” a day in her life, however—rather than saying that she had never been “employed” or “had to go out and look for a job”—Rosen, a professional communicator, misfired, badly. It’s obvious what she meant, and clear her words have been purposely distorted for political advantage. It’s too bad that Obama campaign officials—mostly male—disowned her, stressing that she was not affiliated with the campaign, rather than clarifying her words to underscore that Ann Romney, while lovely, is not an employment expert. It’s not a hard point to grasp. Even three-year-olds get it.

Photograph: Joyce Naltchayan/AFP

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